Randy Hauswirth Quotations

One thing is, I would have liked to see us be a little more patient at times. We never clicked on all cylinders, but you're going to have games like that.

Whatever Jeremiah can give us is great. But I think (playing without Oates in the sectionals) will help us out. The other kids know what they have to do to win, and they're ready to do it.

I think we were a little rusty, and I think it showed. Before that game, we hadn't played in 14 days. That's a long time to go without basketball, but it's good to get a non-conference game in there to get your legs under you again.

We were making silly turnovers and missing bunnies here and there. We finally got it together for a few minutes and made a run at them, but for some reason the wheel fell off a little bit and we got back into making turnovers.

We knew Jeremiah wouldn't be extremely effective, just because he's been hurt. We were hoping he'd make a miraculous recovery overnight, but from what we'd seen in practice he just hadn't progressed enough. So we decided we would try to push the ball up-tempo, and it gave us some easy looks early on. And, actually, we still got looks in the game on shots we normally make, but for some reason we weren't able to knock them down.

We just never really got into a good rhythm. We never hit that groove.

We weren't sure throughout the week if we would have Jeremiah or not. There was a hope that he would be able to make a go of it, but we wanted to be prepared to go without him if we had to.

Every year we go into it like it's two different seasons. First is the regular season, then you start over in the tournament where you basically start from scratch. We feel like we've made one step, and now the opportunity is in front of us to take another step.

I've never coached there and a lot of the kids have never been there. We took the kids (to OU Friday) and watched the games, just to give them a chance to see the place. We don't want them walking in (today) and be in awe of the place, so we tried to mentally prepare them for that.

Defensively, we were much better most of the time tonight. We got a little lackadaisical at the end, but we had good intensity and played with a lot of effort.

That's free points you give up. Especially with them. They're a very good free throw shooting team and a very good shooting team overall.

You're talking about 22, 23 points a game with Jeremiah, and a lot of people thought we were going into last weekend (the game against Eastern Brown) not being able to win. But the kids adapted to what needed to be done, and kids stepped up and proved they can do whatever it takes to fill that hole.

This is what high school basketball is all about. When you go through the tough times, you regroup. Now we have an opportunity to play in games like this.

They're more perimeter oriented than we are, and they're probably a little more athletic of a team than we are. One key for us is that we have to be really conscious of their ability to shoot the ball. Plus, they're so athletic that we have to limit their long rebounds and hold them off the offensive glass.

It's set in that we're losing him, but we'll start to deal with that when we have to next year. Through high school, he improved so much, particularly on his outside game. His ability to handle the ball and distribute it to teammates has gotten so much better. His freshman year, he was strictly a post player. Now he's the complete package.

After (the holidays), there's really no break from here on. Plus we haven't played very many games so far, so we've got a lot of basketball in front of us. It's going to be a tight January.

Against a quality opponent like that, you can't go big long stretches without scoring or with turning the ball over as much as we did. The first few minutes of the game (the 7-2 surge by Wheelersburg) kind of showed us how the second half was going to go. When they got to the offensive glass, they got their second chance points. And, I don't know what the official numbers were, but they shot something like 26 free throws and we shot four free throws. That's a big difference.

I'm happy for Jeremiah for all the awards he's getting. He was so important to our team - he was the kind of kid where, if Jeremiah was playing well, the rest of the kids on the team picked up their intensity as well. He's a great athlete.